Book Image

Crystal Programming

By : George Dietrich, Guilherme Bernal
Book Image

Crystal Programming

By: George Dietrich, Guilherme Bernal

Overview of this book

Crystal is a programming language with a concise and user-friendly syntax, along with a seamless system and a performant core, reaching C-like speed. This book will help you gain a deep understanding of the fundamental concepts of Crystal and show you how to apply them to create various types of applications. This book comes packed with step-by-step explanations of essential concepts and practical examples. You'll learn how to use Crystal’s features to create complex and organized projects relying on OOP and its most common design patterns. As you progress, you'll gain a solid understanding of both the basic and advanced features of Crystal. This will enable you to build any application, including command-line interface (CLI) programs and web applications using IOs, concurrency and C bindings, HTTP servers, and the JSON API. By the end of this programming book, you’ll be equipped with the skills you need to use Crystal programming for building and understanding any application you come across.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
1
Part 1: Getting Started
5
Part 2: Learning by Doing – CLI
10
Part 3: Learn by Doing – Web Application
13
Part 4: Metaprogramming
18
Part 5: Supporting Tools

Installing the Crystal compiler

The first step is to make sure the Crystal compiler is correctly installed. Try running the crystal --version command from your terminal. You can skip to the next section if it successfully shows the compiler version and target architecture.

Go to https://crystal-lang.org/install and check the exact instructions for your operating system. On macOS, Crystal is available from Homebrew. On most Linux distributions, Crystal is available from a repository. Crystal is also available for BSD systems.

Installing the compiler on Windows

On Windows, the Crystal compiler is still experimental (as of Crystal 1.4.0). So, you must enable the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and use a Linux distribution inside Windows.

If you haven't used WSL yet, enabling it is simple. You will need to be running either Windows 10 or Windows 11. Open Windows PowerShell, select Run as Administrator, and run the wsl --install command.

Figure...